Précis:

Protecting children from harm from the mass media involves understanding: 1) the problem; 2) the susceptibility of children at each stage of cognitive development; 3) the mass media of entertainment; 4) your worldview and values; and, 4) media wisdom. 

UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM 

Children on killing sprees… Increased risky behavior by children…. Children at war with their parents…. 

Daily, newspapers proclaim the greatest threat facing parents in the United States – the 77 million “baby kaboom” children born between 1979 and 1989, who are now entering their teenage years – more children than comprised the famous Baby Boom generation!

Many of these children (who are a reward from the Lord according to Psalm 127:3) were not raised in the fear and admonition of the Lord, or on OZZIE AND HARRIET or LEAVE IT TO BEAVER, but on NATURAL BORN KILLERS, HALLOWEEN and SCREAM.

The first signs of the moral character of many of the baby kaboomers who were raised on and by the mass media of entertainment may be the killings conducted over the last two years by the 17 adolescents and pre-adolescents in the USA. According to exhaustive research, the violent media of entertainment has set the moral agenda for the future.

To paraphrase Theodore Roosevelt:  If you educate a man’s mind and not his heart, you will have an educated barbarian.

This is not to stay that all 77 million American children are educated barbarians. Studies show that most who watch the media merely become desensitized. A significant minority become frightened and paranoid. Regrettably, 7 to 11 percent of the adults and up to 31 percent of the teenagers say they want to copy what they see.

And, what do children see?

The Los Angeles Times reports that the Hollywood-based entertainment industry looks forward to the new wave of baby kaboom teenagers because the Hollywood executives have found that teenagers are most easily attracted to sex and violence and immoral behavior in movies and on television.

With the greater numbers comes greater influence. Teenagers are on their way to becoming America's cultural arbiters. Since the success of SCREAM last year, the entertainment industry has put dozens of teen horror projects in the pipeline. Networks are adding teen programs with plenty of sexual activity based on the popularity of programs such as DAWSON’S CREEK, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER and PARTY OF FIVE.

Today's teenagers may be even more of a pop culture steamroller than their parents were. There will be as many of them as there were teenage boomers during the 1960s. They see far more movies than any other demographic group. While only 16% of the population, they buy 25% of the movie tickets. Raised by cable TV, they want constant stimulation.

American Teenagers:

• Teenagers spend $122 billion of their own and their parents' money each year, not including their influence on family purchases.

• In the last three months, 72% of teenagers age 12-19 have gone to the movies.

• Moviegoing is considered an "in" activity among 92% of teenagers, more than playing sports (89%), using the Internet (90%) or going to the beach (76%).

• In the last three months, 71% of teens purchased at least one full-length CD, 33% bought a CD single and 35% bought a full-length cassette.

• Moviegoing peaks in the teenage years. People age 12-20 make up 16% of the population, but buy 26% of movie tickets.

• Nearly 90% of 12- to 20-year-olds reported going to the movies "frequently" or "occasionally." Only 3%-4% said they never go to the movies.

• Los Angeles Times, Calendar 06/09/98 citing: Teenage Research Unlimited; Motion Picture Assn. of America; and, Nielsen Media Research.

Does it matter what children watch?

The evidence is now irrefutable that the mass media of entertainment influences the behavior and the cognitive and spiritual growth of children.

In 1971, the massive, six-volume work known as the "Surgeon General's Report" was published citing over 3,000 studies. By now, almost 30 years later, there are thousands of more studies of all types - inductive, deductive, laboratory, and field studies - focusing on a wide variety of theories for the influence of the mass media from observational learning theory to attitude change theory to release stream theory.

The research is so compelling that the New York Times and the London Times have both concluded that the evidence is irrefutable.

An UCLA-Gallup poll of the top 3000 executives in Hollywood showed that 87% felt that the violence in the media influences violence in society. A MTV poll showed that 92% of the children felt the same way. If these two groups truly believe what they have told the pollsters, then logical questions emerge:  Why do you continue to make salacious violence if you believe that it incites people to violence? And, why do you continue to watch the stuff if you believe that it incites people to violence?

Of course, many of us realize that people follow their values, not their beliefs. It would be fair to say that the opportunity to make money through violence, along with the lifestyle that that money provides, is a value that takes precedence over the belief of the top executives that the mass media of entertainment incites people to violence. And, the desire to be entertained, shocked, titillated, and excited is valued more highly, than the belief of the MTV-polled children that the mass media of entertainment can incite them to violence.

 

UNDERSTANDING YOUR CHILDREN'S SUSCEPTIBILITY

The raison d’être

Getting to the reason for the powerful influence of the mass media of entertainment is very important.

Children go through different stages of cognitive development. Although there are many factors that are common to all ages of development, there are also unique distinctions.

Children often see the world and the media quite differently than adults.  Parents generally look at television programs semantically in terms of the meaning of what is said or what is happening.  Children see syntactically in terms of the action and special effects in the program. For instance, with regard to music, a mother will say to her child, "Did you hear the lyrics in that awful song?" And, the child will respond, "Ah Mom, I don't listen to the words. Did you hear the rhythm and the beat?"

Growing pains

Cognitive development is often directly impacted by the mass media, especially television. It is important to understand that cognition is not thinking; rather, thinking is part of cognition, and cognition itself is the process of knowing, which philosophers and theologians call epistemology. Cognitive development is similar to building a house step-by-step from a blueprint, or to adding colors to our mental palette, or to installing an operating system in a computer so that the computer can then do all the tasks, or thinking, that you direct it to do.

Each of these tasks must be done correctly and in the right order or the result will be a disaster. The human operating system develops over many years in a series of stages. Each stage has unique characteristics and each stage must develop properly.

For instance, once when I was teaching at an Ivy League graduate school, a women in the audience shrieked because her toddler had picked up a sharp instrument and was about to do what every toddler does with whatever they pick up, which is put it in his mouth. After quickly taking the sharp tool away from her toddler, the mother started to lecture him.

After the wave of concern in the room died down, I noted that toddlers are in the sensation stage of cognitive development, which merely means that they learn through their senses, and that taking the object away from her child was the right thing to do, but lecturing the toddler would have no effect because the toddler was not at that stage of development where he could understand the logic of her arguments. Thus, I noted toddlers have to be protected by their parents and cannot be expected to make wise decisions when they are presented with dangerous situations.

When you pass from one stage of development to another, you tend to forget what the previous stage was like. Thus, when my six-year-old boy, Robby, was frightened by a thunder storm, my eleven-year-old, Peirce, tried to get his younger brother to be quiet by telling him to "Shut up." When this compassionate request didn't work, my oldest told Robby that the reason for the thunderstorm was that God was angry at him. Of course, this only aggravated Robby’s fears.  I pointed out to Peirce that Robby was affected by the storm very differently than he was because Robby was in the imagination stage of development wherein his imagination was predominant, and he was trying to sort out the difference between fact and fiction.

I reminded Peirce about the time he had a friend stay over night when he was 9-years-old, and the friend had nightmares all night long. The next morning, I asked the young boy what was bothering him, and he said that his father had taken him to see the R-rated movie TOTAL RECALL, an extremely violent movie. The boy said that he didn't like the scene where Arnold Schwarzenegger shoots Sharon Stone, who is posing as his wife, and says, "Consider that a divorce."

When I called his father to tell him of the fears expressed by his son, he replied that his son was a man and that he took his son to a lot of R-rated movies. I noted that his son was in the imagination stage of cognitive development and was incapable of dealing with the violence in many R-rated movies. I said that taking him to see these films was like putting him on the front line of psychological and spiritual warfare just like sending children into battle without adequate training and before they are big enough to carry their weapons. After three months, the father called to say that I was right and that he could see that his son was disturbed by the movies to which he had taken him.

Trained to kill

Perhaps Lt. Col. David Grossman has done the most to help us understand the ability of the mass media of entertainment to influence younger media consumers to violence.

Lt. Col. Grossman spent almost a quarter of a century as an army psychologist, learning and studying how to enable people to kill. When he investigated the killings by the 15 pre-adolescents and adolescents last year, he found that there was a significant correlation between how the media had trained them to kill, and how the army trains its recruits to kill.

Lt. Col. Grossman points out that killing is unnatural. Killing requires training because there is a built-in aversion to killing one's own kind. Only sociopaths – who by definition don't have that resistance – lack this innate violence immune system.

Thus, children don't naturally kill. It is a learned skill, and they learn it from violence in the home and, most pervasively, from violence as entertainment in television, the movies, and interactive video games.

Even in war there is a reticence to killing your fellow man or woman. For instance, the average firing rate was incredibly low in Civil War battles. The killing potential of the average Civil War regiment was anywhere from five hundred to a thousand men per minute. The actual killing rate was only one or two men per minute per regiment. At the Battle of Gettysburg, of the 27,000 muskets picked up from the dead and dying after the battle, 90 percent were loaded. These men were willing to die for their beliefs but not kill for their beliefs.

During World War II, the U.S. Army discovered that only 15 to 20 percent of the individual riflemen could bring themselves to fire at an exposed enemy soldier. From the military perspective, a 15 percent firing rate among riflemen is like a 15 percent literacy rate among librarians.

When the military became aware of that, they systematically went about the process of trying to fix this "problem." So, by the Korean War, around 55 percent of the soldiers were willing to fire to kill, and by Vietnam, the rate rose to over 90 percent.

Lt. Col. Grossman notes that understanding how the military increases the killing rate of soldiers in combat is instructive, because our culture today is doing the same thing to our children. The training methods militaries use are desensitization, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and role modeling.

Desensitization

Lt. Col. Grossman points out that brutalization and desensitization are what happens at boot camp. From the moment you step off the bus, you are physically and verbally abused: countless pushups, endless hours at attention or running with heavy loads, while carefully trained professionals take turns screaming at you. This brutalization is designed to break down your existing mores and norms and to accept a new set of values that embrace destruction, violence and death as a way of life. In the end, you are desensitized to violence and accept it as a normal and essential survival skill in your brutal new world.

Something very similar to this desensitization toward violence is happening to our children through violence in the media – but instead of 18-year-olds, it begins at the age of 18 months when a child is first able to discern what is happening on television. Even though young children have some understanding of what it means to pretend, they are developmentally unable to distinguish clearly between fantasy and reality.

When young children see somebody shot, stabbed, raped, brutalized, degraded, or murdered on TV, to them it is as though it were actually happening. To have a child of three, four or five watch a "splatter" movie, learning to relate to a character for the first 90 minutes and then in the last 30 minutes watch helplessly as that new friend is hunted and brutally murdered, is the moral and psychological equivalent of introducing your child to a friend, letting her play with that friend, and then butchering that friend in front of your child's eyes. Regrettably, this happens to our children hundreds upon hundreds of times.

Classical conditioning

Lt. Col. Grossman shows that the Japanese were masters at using classical conditioning with their soldiers. Early in World War II, Chinese prisoners were placed in a ditch on their knees with their hands bound behind them. One by one, a select few Japanese soldiers would go into the ditch and bayonet "their" prisoner to death. Up on the bank, countless other young soldiers would cheer them on in their violence. Comparatively few soldiers actually killed in these situations, but by making the others watch and cheer, the Japanese were able to use these kinds of atrocities to classically condition a very large audience to associate pleasure with human death and suffering. Immediately afterwards, the soldiers who had been spectators were treated to sake, the best meal they had had in months, and to so-called comfort girls. The result? They learned to associate committing violent acts with pleasure.

Operant conditioning teaches you to kill, but classical conditioning is a subtle but powerful mechanism that teaches you to like it.

As Lt. Col. Grossman shows, our children watch vivid pictures of human suffering and death, and they learn to associate it with their favorite soft drink and candy bar, or their girlfriend's perfume.

After the Jonesboro shootings, one of the high-school teachers told how her students reacted when she told them about the shootings at the middle school. "They laughed," she said with dismay. A similar reaction happens all the time in movie theaters when there is bloody violence. The young people laugh and cheer and keep right on eating popcorn and drinking pop. We have raised a generation of barbarians who have learned to associate violence with pleasure, like the Romans cheering and snacking as the Christians were slaughtered in the Coliseum.

Operant conditioning

Lt. Col. Grossman states that the third method the military uses is operant conditioning, a very powerful procedure of stimulus-response, stimulus-response. A benign example is the use of flight simulators to train pilots. An airline pilot in training sits in front of a flight simulator for endless hours; when a particular warning light goes on, he is taught to react in a certain way. When another warning light goes on, a different reaction is required. Stimulus-response, stimulus-response, stimulus-response. One day the pilot is actually flying a jumbo jet; the plane is going down, and 300 people are screaming behind him. He is scared out of his wits; but he does the right thing. Why? Because he has been conditioned to respond reflexively to this particular crisis.

The military and law enforcement community have made killing a conditioned response. Whereas infantry training in World War II used bull's-eye targets, now soldiers learn to fire at realistic, man-shaped silhouettes that pop into their field of view. That is the stimulus. The trainees have only a split second to engage the target. The conditioned response is to shoot the target, and then it drops. Stimulus-response, stimulus-response, stimulus-response – soldiers or police officers experience hundreds of repetitions. Later, when soldiers are on the battlefield or a police officer is walking a beat and somebody pops up with a gun, they will shoot reflexively and shoot to kill. 75 to 80 percent of the shooting on the modern battlefield is the result of this kind of stimulus-response training.

Now, if you're a little troubled by that, how much more should we be troubled by the fact that every time a child plays an interactive point-and-shoot video game, he is learning the exact same conditioned reflex and motor skills.

Lt. Col. Grossman says that he was an expert witness in a murder case in South Carolina offering mitigation for a boy who was facing the death penalty. He tried to explain to the jury that interactive video games had conditioned him to shoot a gun to kill. He had spent hundreds of dollars on video games learning to point and shoot, point and shoot. One day he and his buddy decided it would be fun to rob the local convenience store. They entered, and he pointed a snub-nosed .38 pistol at the clerk's head. The clerk turned to look at him, and the defendant shot reflexively from about six feet. The bullet hit the clerk right between the eyes - which is a pretty remarkable shot with that weapon at that range – and killed this father of two.

Afterward, Lt. Col. Grossman asked the boy what happened and why he did it. It clearly was not part of the plan to kill the guy – it was being videotaped from six different directions. He said, “I don't know. It was a mistake. It wasn't supposed to happen.”

One of the boys allegedly involved in the Jonesboro shootings (and they are just boys) had a fair amount of experience shooting real guns. The other one was a non-shooter and, to the best of our knowledge, had almost no experience shooting. Between them, those two boys fired 27 shots from a range of over 100 yards, and they hit 15 people. That's pretty remarkable shooting.

Lt. Col. Grossman says that he runs into these situations often – kids who have never picked up a gun in their lives pick up a real gun and are incredibly accurate. Why? Video games.

Role models

Lt. Col. Grossman notes that in the military, you are immediately confronted with a role model: your drill sergeant. He personifies violence and aggression. Along with military heroes, these violent role models have always been used to influence young, impressionable minds.

Today, the media are providing our children with role models, and this can be seen not just in the lawless sociopaths in movies and TV shows, but it can also be seen in the media-inspired, copycat aspects of the Jonesboro murders. This is the part of these  juvenile crimes that the TV networks would much rather not report.

When the pictures of teenage killers appear on TV, somewhere there is a potentially violent little boy who says to himself, “Well, I'll show all those people who have been mean to me. I know how to get my picture on TV too.”

Thus, Lt. Col. Grossman notes we get copycat, cluster murders that work their way across America like a virus spread by the six o'clock news. No matter what someone has done, if you put his picture on TV, you have made him a celebrity, and someone, somewhere, will emulate him.

The lineage of the Jonesboro shootings began at Pearl, Mississippi, fewer than six months before. In Pearl, a 16-year-old boy was accused of killing his mother and then going to his school and shooting nine students, two of whom died, including his ex-girlfriend. Two months later, this virus spread to Paducah, Kentucky, where a 14-year-old boy was arrested for killing three students and wounding five others.

A very important step in the spread of this copycat crime virus occurred in Stamps, Arkansas, 15 days after Pearl and just a little over 90 days before Jonesboro. In Stamps, a 14-year-old boy, who was angry at his schoolmates, hid in the woods and fired at children as they came out of school. Sound familiar? Only two children were injured in this crime, so most of the world didn't hear about it; but it got great regional coverage on TV, and two little boys in Jonesboro, Arkansas, probably did hear about it.

Is this a reasonable price to pay for the TV networks' “right” to turn juvenile defendants into celebrities and role models by playing up their pictures on TV?

 

UNDERSTANDING the MASS MEDIA

“What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don't they come from your desires that battle within you?”   - James 4:1  (NIV)

The pen is mightier than the sword[1]

Contrary to common sense and the weight of evidence, for many years people in the audience accepted the fallacy that the media did not influence their behavior.  These people failed to make wise choices in their media consumption and, consequently, contributed to the support of degrading, unwholesome and often immoral media.

Of course, many of them wanted to believe the media myth because they lusted after the illicit, the emotive and the evocative much like media addicted children who argue the media don’t influence them while begging and whining for the latest trendy, media-hyped product or article of clothing.

Most people no longer believe the false disclaimers of the media spokespersons and now think the biggest problem facing our society is a breakdown of morality, which they attribute to the negative influence of the mass media.

After years of denial, even 87% of the top media executives now admit that the violence in the mass media contribute to the violence in society.[2]  And children, too, are aware of the ability of the entertainment media to influence their behavior.[3]

People throughout the world have a particular distrust and disdain for the negative influence of the explicit entertainment being produced by Hollywood.

While such awareness is important, awareness alone is not the answer to the problem.  It is, of course, the first step toward the answer.

The print media, more than any other, have consistently contributed to these exposés of the failings of the newer media.  The print media have been aided and abetted by politicians who have jumped on the “blame-the-media” bandwagon.  This carping has often created a climate of fear, anger and reaction.  Some communications about the problem have been so argumentative and biased that they have contributed to the problem rather the solution.

The answer is to go beyond complaining.  People must be helped to develop the media awareness and discernment skills to use the entertainment media without being abused by it.

A short cut is the longest distance

The next step toward a solution is to become informed about the influence the entertainment media have on our society, particularly with regard to violence, sexual activity and values, and to develop discernment and biblical critical thinking skills regarding such influence. Children, in particular, are motivated to change their media habits by an awareness of the influence of the entertainment media on these areas of their lives.

Once children understand the potential power of the mass media to negatively influence them, they will become your ally in the culture wars.  They will want to develop media awareness, discernment and the critical thinking  skills necessary to choose the good, reject the bad and overcome the negative images of the mass media of entertainment.

Why should we be concerned?

Throughout history people have understood the power of communication, art and entertainment to change lives and shape society.  Leaders have called people to action, philosophers have intoned ideas that shaped civilizations and prophets have proclaimed truths that transformed history.  From Moses’s demand of the Pharaoh to “Let my people go!” to the phrase “Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!” that ignited the flames of the French Revolution, communications have stirred people to action, to great sacrifice and even to great cruelty.

Christians, in particular, have understood the power of the word:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was with God in the beginning.  Through Him all things were made, without Him nothing was made that has been made.”  -  John 1:3 (NIV)

As his desire to lead, influence and inspire has grown, man has searched for new media to transmit his creations and communications to others  from cave drawings to hieroglyphics to the printing press to the Internet.  Every new medium of communications has brought hope and engendered fears.

Selling Murder

To illustrate the power of media, consider the work of Dr. Joseph Goebbels, who was the National Socialist (Nazi) propaganda minister from 1933 to 1945.  He exploited radio, press, cinema, and theater in Germany to destroy the Jews, evangelical Christians, handicapped Germans and other groups.  In 1994, the Discovery Channel aired SELLING MURDER, an important documentary investigating how Goebbels used mass media to influence the German people to accept the mass murder of human beings.

The documentary shows that at a time when a majority of German people rejected mercy killings (an euphemism for murder), Goebbels produced a movie called I ACCUSE, an emotive feature film about a beautiful, intelligent woman who is dying of an incurable disease and begs to be allowed to commit suicide. After the movie was released, a majority of German people said they had changed their minds and now supported mercy killings. After a few more of Goebbels’s films about invalids and handicapped people, the German people became strong believers in the efficacy of mass mercy killings.

While the attempted annihilation of Jews by the National Socialists is well documented, the atrocities did not stop with the Jewish race.  The main focus of SELLING MURDER is a group that has been somewhat overlooked: the mentally and physically ill of Germany.  In 1939, Hitler ordered the killing of the mentally and physically disabled, labeling them as "life unworthy of life."  His reasoning was that the cost of keeping them alive in asylums and hospitals was too great.  The real reason, however, stemmed from the government's determination to eliminate any threat to their idea of producing a superior race.

As an insight into the power of the mass media, historian Paul Johnson writes in his book MODERN TIMES,[4] "Hitler appears always to have approached politics in terms of visual images. Like Lenin and still more like Stalin, he was an outstanding practitioner of the Century's most radical vice: social engineering  the notion that human beings can be shoveled around like concrete. But in Hitler's case, there was always an artistic dimension to these Satanic schemes.  Hitler's artistic approach was absolutely central to his success.  [Historians all agree] the Germans were the best-educated nation in the world. To conquer their minds was very difficult. Their hearts, their sensibilities, were easy targets."

Indoctrination, with specific use of newsreel and films, was vital to Hitler's control of the new generation. Gerhard Rempel, in his book HITLER'S CHILDREN: THE HITLER YOUTH AND THE SS[5] wrote: "Each day began with a newsreel, followed by the various types of training.  On Sunday mornings, an ideological program was substituted for church services, and Sunday nights were set aside for motion pictures."

SELLING MURDER is must viewing for every moral person concerned about the use of the mass media of entertainment to influence societal behavior. Similarities between the National Socialist use of film and contemporary television programs about Dr. Kevorkian, abortion and euthanasia are frightening. Two weeks before this documentary ran on the Discovery Channel, a network television program examined the current practice of killing patients by doctors in the Netherlands. The rationalization for these wholesale murders of patients in the Netherlands were all too similar to the Nazi propaganda in SELLING MURDER.

Incite to riot

There are also numerous examples of media induced mass hysteria and violence that can be gleaned from newspapers and in television news reports.  Following the destructive looting and rioting in Los Angeles and around the country after the four policemen involved in the Rodney King case were first acquitted, a few media professionals admitted that their coverage of the Rodney King affair may have been partly responsible for inciting the riots.

For instance, Ed Turner, vice president of CNN (no relation to his boss, Ted Turner), admitted that TV as a whole played the most violent excerpts of the King beating too often. Another broadcaster equated TV’s preoccupation with the violence to snuff films (films of people actually being killed), which precipitated a wave of copycat crimes.

Glorifying gangs

Closely related to the riots are gang movies that have left a trail of tears and death.  Police have called some of these films “irresponsible” and “exploitive.”  Several people have been killed and wounded at the openings of films that exploit gang violence.

At the opening of filmmaker John Singleton’s movie BOYZ IN THE HOOD, 33 people were injured and two people died from gunshot wounds. When BOYZ IN THE HOOD was shown in one California prison, 14 people died in one night of race rioting in the prison.

When NEW JACK CITY opened, riots broke out in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Houston.  More than 1,500 teenagers rampaged through Westwood, Los Angeles.  A teenager was killed in Brooklyn where rival gangs fired more than 100 shots.

Violence broke out in at least eight states after the premiere of JUICE.  A girl caught in the cross fire of two rival street gangs died.  A man coming out of a theater showing the film was paralyzed from the neck down after he was shot. At one theater, two rival gangs had a shooting match in the lobby.

Some time later, copying a murder scene from JUICE, a teenager named Hicks, who killed a man for his tires, pleaded guilty to malice and armed robbery in what a prosecutor called a totally pointless murder.

"One of the co-defendants [Mr. Clegg] said he and Mr. Hicks [the killer] had seen the movie JUICE the weekend before this particular incident, and there was a sequence in it where a totally pointless murder was committed," Clegg said. "I'm told the words Mr. Hicks spoke at the time he fired the shot came from that movie: 'Oh, by the way, BAM!'"[6] 

Bizarre behavior

The impact of the mass media on gang violence and gun play has been discounted because, after all, the people involved in gangs have a predisposition toward violence. However, there are more peculiar and particular manifestations of the influence of the mass media that seem to point only to the media event itself as the source of the behavior in question.

For example, when the movie THE PROGRAM was first released,  several teenagers mimicked the stupid stunt pulled by the main characters in the movie by lying down in the middle of the road.  These copycat incidents resulted in two severe injuries and two deaths. Touchstone Pictures, a division of The Disney Company, quickly edited out the offensive scene.

 On the other hand

On the positive side of the influence of the entertainment media equation: the epic television program JESUS OF NAZARETH introduced millions of people throughout the world to Jesus Christ; A MAN CALLED PETER, about the preacher Peter Marshall, brought a flood of many young men into the pulpit; and, CHARIOTS OF FIRE brought many to Jesus and gave many more a sense of God's purpose in their life.

Child’s play?

It is clear to any parent with a baby that children learn to a large degree by mimicking the behavior of the adults around them, including those on television and in movies.[7]

One of the most famous examples was the connection that a judge in Liverpool, England, made between the horror movie CHILD’S PLAY 3 and the murder of a 2-year-old James Bulger by two 11-year-old boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables.^[8] According to the judge, the horror movie CHILD’S PLAY 3 presents some horrifying parallels to the actual murder of little James Bulger, and the movie was viewed repeatedly by one of the killers just before the murder took place. The judge noted:

The horror movie depicts a baby doll who comes to life and gets blue paint splashed in its face.  There was blue paint on the dead child’s face.

The movie depicts a kidnapping.  James was abducted by the two older boys before they killed him.

The climax of the movie comes as two young boys murder the doll on a train, mutilating the doll’s face. James was first mutilated and bludgeoned by the two older boys and then left on a railroad track to be run over.

This story was widely publicized around the world, but the link to CHILD’S PLAY 3 seldom made the news.  Why were these facts overlooked or withheld by the mainstream media?  Why not ask your local paper or TV news department?  The answers could prove enlightening.

Beavis and Butt-Head

Television also influences young minds negatively.  The MTV's series BEAVIS AND BUTT-HEAD was blamed for giving a 5-year-old Austin Messner the idea to set a fire in his own home that killed his 2-year-old sister Jessica.[9] In western Ohio, three young girls set another fire while imitating a trick from the show.[10] In Sydney, Australia, three teenage girls set fire to a apartment complex after viewing the animated program.[11]

The cartoon comedy BEAVIS AND BUTT-HEAD features two teenagers who comment on rock videos and spend time burning and destroying things. The show also advocates disobedience, disrespect for all adults (especially parents) and promotes such fun ideas as "fire is cool." The program is totally offensive in nature and content, with no redeeming value whatsoever.

In response to the uproar, one insider made the following cynical comments:

"I wouldn't be able to ignore the millions of dollars in sales... controversy sells."
 - Glenn Hendricks, vice president of licensing for OSP Publishing, producers of BEAVIS AND BUTT-HEAD T-shirts, posters and buttons. [12]

Natural born killers?

The Oliver Stone movie NATURAL BORN KILLERS has produced a slew of copycat murders.

Nathan K. Martinez, an unhappy 17-year-old obsessed with the movie NATURAL BORN KILLERS murdered his stepmother and his half-sister in their suburban home 15 miles southwest of Salt Lake City.

In Georgia, Jason Lewis, a 15-year-old, murdered his parents, firing multiple shotgun blasts into their heads.  Letters found in his room indicated he worshipped Satan and, along with three friends, had formulated a plan to kill all their parents and to copy the cross-country swing of violence portrayed in NATURAL BORN KILLERS.

Christopher Smith, an 18-year-old, shouted at television cameras, "I'm a natural born killer!" echoing the words of actor Woody Harrelson in the movie NATURAL BORN KILLERS following his arrest for shooting to death an 82-year-old man.

In Toombs County, Georgia, four people in their 20s were charged with abducting and killing a man, stealing his truck and fleeing in it after watching the movie NATURAL BORN KILLERS 19 times.

One gruesome incident prompted novelist John Grisham to suggest that the survivors of these killing sprees should sue Stone.[13]

The incidence that incensed Grisham occurred in March of 1995 when two teenagers saw NATURAL BORN KILLERS in Oklahoma, then drove to Mississippi and killed Bill Savage in the same randomly violent way as the movie's protagonists do.  They then went to Louisiana and nearly killed a women in a convenience store (she is now a quadriplegic).  One of the two said the movie led directly to their actions.

Grisham lived near Savage and has written a passionate four page letter about the murder to a literary magazine.  He concluded his blistering attack on Stone's movie and on Hollywood's unwillingness to take responsibility for its product by suggesting:

"The last hope of imposing some sense on Hollywood will come through another great American tradition, the lawsuit. A case can be made that there exists a direct causal link between NATURAL BORN KILLERS and the death of Bill Savage.... It will take only one large verdict against the likes of Oliver Stone, and then the party will be over."[14]

Why do critics love these repellent movies?

In response to the critical acclaim movies like NATURAL BORN KILLERS and THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS have received, the March 17, 1991 Sunday LOS ANGELES TIMES Calendar section  asked, "Why Do Critics Love These Repellent Movies?" [15] Stephen Farber responded that moviegoers looking for guidance are becoming alienated by the reviewers' penchant for grotesque violence.  He said it has become chic to praise a movie for being nihilistic, macabre, unsentimental.  He concludes that "in contemporary... criticism, there's no perspective, no sense of what is truly valuable, that critical discourse has sunk to a new low.

Lethal weapons

With TV sets turned on in the inner city for 11 hours a day and multiplying satellite, cable and broadcast channels, television “has become the closest and most constant companion for American children,” according to Mortimer B. Zuckerman writing in U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT.[16] In fact, Zuckerman continues:

“It has become the nation’s mom and pop, storyteller, baby sitter, preacher, and teacher. Our children watch an astonishing 5,000 hours by the first grade and 19,000 hours by the end of high school—more time than they spend in class. The question more and more concerning parents, psychologists and public officials is this: What is all this viewing doing  to them?”[17]

A 1992 report from the American Psychological Association states, “Television can cause aggressive behavior and can cultivate values favoring the use of aggression.” [18]

According to Dr. Victor Strasburger, chief of The American Academy of Pediatrics’ section on adolescents, “We are basically saying the controversy is over.  There is clearly a relationship between media violence and violence in society.”[19]

A report on four decades of entertainment TV from the media research team of Robert Lichter, Linda Lichter, Stanley Rothman and Daniel Amundson found about 50 crimes, including a dozen murders, in every hour of prime time television.  This indicates that our children may see from 800,000 to 1.5 million acts of violence and witness 192,000 to 360,000 murders on television by the time they are 17-years-old.[20] 

This contrasts radically with the generations of men and women who grew up without this flood of violent images from the entertainment media.  Lichter and his fellow authors wrote, “Since 1955 TV characters have been murdered at a rate 1,000 times higher than real-world victims."[21]  Michael Medved said if the same murder rate was applied to the general population, everyone in the United States would be killed in just 50 days.[22]

Survey show that 60% of the children in our society watch TV without any supervision and 40% have a TV set in their room. However, television is just a part of their entertainment diet. Radio, CDs, videos, video games, computer games, magazines, comics, the Internet, and much more constitute the rich media diet of  most American children. 

If you are over 40-years-old, you probably watch only six movies a year in theaters, most of which are family films.  Teenagers average watching 50, 80% of which are R-rated or PG-13.  They watch another 50 movies a year on video.[23]

Cigarette companies are no longer allowed to advertise on television because of the threat to human life and health that such advertisements pose.  Yet, television and movies advertise sex and violence day-after-day to the detriment of thousands of people who are maimed, raped or robbed by the deluded Ted Bundys of this world.

Just say no?

While the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and other authorities tell teenagers "Just say no to sex, delay the initiation of sex, be monogamous," Dr. Sevgi Aral says teenagers either do not hear the message, or simply do not act on it.^[24]  Statistics from the CDC show that more than half the young women between the ages of 15 to 19 years of age have had premarital sex.

The question that must be asked is: "Why aren't teens heeding the warnings of the CDC and other authorities?"  The answer is simple.  Teenagers are responding the message coming across in movies and TV shows.  "Sexuality is all important, and it's very glamorous," said Aral.

With all the pressure that the Federal Government has put on television executives to clean up the violence on TV, sex has replaced violence as television’s number one obsession. A study of prime time television conducted by U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT found that out of 58 programs monitored, almost half contained sexual acts or references to sex.  The magazine reported that a sexual act or reference occurred every four minutes on average in prime time programs. ^[25]

Perverse sex and violence are two of television’s most effective lures for capturing an audience.  Traditionally, conservatives have complained about excessive or perverse sex on television, while liberals have complained about violence.  Now both camps have joined in the battle to clean up both excessive sex and violence, though perverse sex is still a matter of debate.

Using the U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT findings, the average child who watches broadcast television sees 240,000 to 480,000 sexual acts or references to sex, including everything from touching to kissing to intercourse,^[26] by the time they are 17.  Since MTV averages 1,500 sex acts per hour,^[27] if we add some MTV and cable television to their mass media diet, children may see millions of sexual acts or references to sex by the time they are 17.  This does not include the sexual acts or references to sex they will see or hear in the other entertainment media.

Carnal knowledge

Television is an "important sex educator" which teaches children to “go for it,” according to the National Institute for Mental Health.[28]  On TV, "it's absolutely taken for granted that you date somebody a couple of times and sleep with them,"  said Michael Josephson, president of the Josephson Institute of Ethics.[29]  Contrary to real life, premarital fornication on TV outnumbers sex within marriage by eight to one according to the Media Research Center.[30]

What boggles the mind is that neither movie nor television characters are ever shown to reap the consequences of their actions.  The heroine rarely gets pregnant.  If she does, she conveniently obtains an abortion.  Nor do the involved parties come down with genital warts, herpes, gonorrhea, syphilis or AIDS.

The mass media must reverse its trend of portraying immoral sex as glamorous and desirable when, in fact, promiscuous sexual activity can be psychologically and physically ruinous and can even lead to death.  It is time to promote a ruthless new honesty in the media with their all powerful influence on our culture, especially on our young.

The Roman Coliseum

David Puttnam, former president of Columbia Pictures and the producer of CHARIOTS OF FIRE, in an interview with Bill Moyers on PBS TV, explained that once people are exposed to the spectacle of blood and sex, they want more and more as they become hardened to the titillation of the last violent or sexual act which they see.  Just as a drug addict who becomes less and less responsive to a drug keeps looking for the initial "ideal" rush, so those who are addicted to the sex and violence in films seek increasing doses of sex and violence to appease their lust. Since the days of the bloody sports in the Roman Coliseum people have demanded increasing decadence with each voyeuristic exposure to the violation of moral taboos.

The reel world

Many aspects of Hollywood’s virtual reality skewer our children’s attitudes and prompt them to imitate self-destructive or uncivil behavior.  Confusing the reel world with the real world can create fears and anxieties that are abnormal

The entertainment media, including entertainment television and movies, does not portray reality or real life but a particular and intentionally emotive perspective on reality.  Even reality programs and television news programs concentrate on the exploitable and the emotive

Hollywood often become boringly repetitious, recycling the same plots, ideas and characters to the point of nausea. In an analytical examination of the messages of the reel world, Dr. Robert Kubey pinpointed the primary messages of the media:^[31]

• Materialism.

• For everything there is a quick fix.

• Young is better.

• Open and unfilled time is not desirable; in fact it cannot be tolerated.

• Violence is acceptable.

• Religion is unacceptable.

• Sex is only good outside of marriage.

Is this the way we want our children to view the world? Is this the way we want the rest of the world to view us?  These messages are destructive of the civilization. Like cancer, they eat away at the fabric of our civilization.

No place to hide

We cannot hide from the mass media.  The mass media form an integral part of the fabric of contemporary society.  They reflect and shape our culture and our vision. The larger than life images of movies, the emotive beat of pop music, the seductive reality of television, the virtual reality of the Internet call us to appreciate our talents and take a stand for biblical principles or  seduce us into perversion and senseless violence.[32]

Movies and television have more influence on our society than all the preachers and ministries combined.  Every time excessive sex or violence is watched by someone in the community it has an effect on the community, even if you were not watching. According to studies by the Annenberg School of Communications, substantiated by the National Institute of Mental Health, television programs and films:

• directly affect a small percentage of the viewers who are susceptible to the message of the movie and will emulate that message in their own lives by copying the sexual, violent or immoral act modeled in the movie;

• adversely affect a larger proportion of the audience, causing them to fear the act in question; and,

• have no apparent effect on the largest portion of the audience, although there may be long term consequences of watching anti-social material.

Excessive sex and violence in music, television and film affects the community by affecting members of the community who go out and copy the immoral acts they hear and witness and by implanting fear in the community.

The point of this litany of problems with respect to different media and arts is simply to point out that there is no place to hide.  The media and the arts are pervasive in our society. Americans are in the midst of entertaining themselves to death.  Either denial or license will only allow the problems to continue to grow out of control.

“Do not be misled: Bad company corrupts good character."  - 1 Corinthians 15:33 (NIV)

 

UNDERSTANDING YOUR WORLDVIEW 

“Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is his good, pleasing and perfect will.”  - Romans 12:2 (NIV)

"Pluralism destroys reason."  Ravi Zacharias

Definitions of different worldviews

Yale scholar Harold Bloom analyzes the emergence of a post-Christian America in his book, THE AMERICAN RELIGION, and says that the god we worship is ourselves.  He says the real religion of America is Gnosticism, an elitist heresy that combines mystical Greek and oriental philosophies and claims that a person needed special knowledge to get to the highest heaven.  Christianity posits that you need no special  knowledge because Jesus Christ offers salvation to all who believe in Him by faith, which is a gift from God.

Considering the plethora of worldviews presented in the mass media, it is important to have a basic knowledge of them and how they differ. The more you understand these worldviews and how they differ, the better your discernment in all areas of life, including the mass media. As you read about these worldviews, try to discern what they believe about the nature of reality which is their ontology and what they believe about how you know about reality which is their epistemology.

In practical terms, there are many “worldviews” but not all attempt to give answers to the major questions of life.  Those important worldviews views that have addressed comprehensive life issues would include:

Atheism

Atheism is the disbelief or denial of the existence of God or a Supreme intelligent Being.  Atheism is a ferocious system that leaves nothing above us to excite awe, nor around us to awaken tenderness. 

Because the atheist rejects any belief in the supernatural, he must view man as an evolutionary creature with no objective basis of morality.  Ethics can only be subjective and self-defined, leading to the survival of the “strong” and destruction of the weak.  Abortion, infanticide and euthanasia are usually common practice in an atheistic culture.

Deism

Deism is the belief or system of religious opinions of those who acknowledge the existence of a transcendent God, but deny revelation and the personal immanence of God.  Deism is the belief in natural religion only, or in those truths in doctrine and practice that man is to discover by the light of reason, independent and exclusive of any revelation from God.  Hence deism implies a disbelief in the Divine origin of the Scriptures. 

While a deist would believe that there is a God who started things out, the deist would also contend that God is no longer intimately involved with creation.  Therefore, there is no purpose in seeking God, or expecting Him to meet our daily needs.

Secular Humanism

Secular Humanism pertains to the present world, or to things not spiritual or holy.  Thus, it relates to things not immediately or primarily respecting the soul and the spirit, but only to the body and the physical world.  The secular concerns of life include making provision for the support of life, the preservation of health and the temporal prosperity of men and of states.  

Secular  power is that which superintends and governs the temporal affairs of men, the civil or political power; and, is distinguished from spiritual or ecclesiastical power. 

The humanist only looks to man for solutions to our problems.  There is no room for supernatural revelation or miracles as humanism is atheistic.  Humanism breeds despair and fatalism.

During the Renaissance, humanism was a cultural and intellectual movement that focused on human beings and their values, capacities and worth, and emphasized the rediscovery and study of the literature, art and civilization of ancient Greece and Rome.  Thus, humanism dealt with the humanities, a conscious return to classical ideals and forms, and a rejection of medieval religious authority.  Boccaccio, Erasmus, and Petrarch were the leading Renaissance humanists.

Pantheism

Pantheism is the doctrine that the universe is god, or the system of theology in which it is maintained that the universe is the supreme god, as well as a belief in or worship of all gods. 

Logic and rationale are discarded by the pantheist.  Anything goes because nothing is supreme.  Ultimately, a pantheistic society embraces chaos as normal behavior in its attempts at attaining liberty. 

Furthermore, without a God who is good and determines the laws of nature, the pantheist sees the world around him as chaotic and threatening and is not likely to become an explorer or scientist.

Materialism

The doctrine that matter is the only true reality and that everything in the world, including thought, will and feeling, can be explained only in terms of matter. Thus, there is nothing beyond what we can observe.  Philosophy is a game of language.  Since matter is all there is, comfort, pleasure and wealth are the only or highest goals or values.

Materialism holds that matter is the final reality.  Democritus, Epicurus and the Stoic conceived of reality as material in nature. The theory was renewed and developed beginning in the 17th Century, especially by Hobbes. This worldview was developed further from the middle of the 19th Century, particularly in the form of Dialectical Materialism and Logical Positivism.

Marxist / Leninism

The political and economic ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, which Marx called “the ultimate humanism,”[33] as applied by Vladimir Lenin. It is said that Lenin asked God to forgive him on his deathbed.

This system is based on the atheistic assumption that all human experience, behavior and history are the product of purely material forces acting upon the individual and should be planned and controlled by the state to achieve, eventually, a classless society with total equality of goods. 

Marx said that to achieve this classless society the dictatorship of the proletariat must: abolish private ownership of property (which God ordains in the Bible to protect the weak individual such as Naboth from the greedy ruler); abolish religion (which gives man the assurance of things hoped for); abolish the state or nation (which God established to regulate commerce and protect the family); and, to abolish the family (which God ordained as the basic unit of government, education and procreation).  In Communism, driven by the politics of envy and greed, what a man cannot do on his own to achieve equality of life, he looks to the state to make happen.

There are two Marxist refinements on Materialism: Dialectical Materialism, which views matter as the sole agent of change and all change as the product of a constant conflict between opposites arising from the internal contradictions inherent in all events, ideas and movements; and, Application of the principles of Dialectical Materialism to the study of history and sociology, which is called Historical Materialism.

Dialectical Materialism is the official philosophy of Communism. The obverse of Hegel's dialectical Idealism, it holds that men create social life solely in response to economic needs. Thus, all aspects of society reflect the economic structure.  Growth, change and development take place through a "struggle of opposites" process which individuals cannot influence. 

Historical Materialism regards material economic forces as the foundations on which social and political institutions and ideas are built.

This philosophy has many non-Communist advocates and has undermined morality in the United States and has led to a societal drive toward consensus and compromise even where right and wrong is at stake. 

Nihilism

According to this doctrine all values are meaningless and baseless, and nothing can be known or communicated. Nihilism is anextreme form of skepticism that denies all existence,rejects all distinctions in moral value and refutes all previous theories of morality. This worldview holds that the destruction of existing political or social institutions is necessary for future improvement.

Nihilism started as a revolutionary movement in mid 19th century Russia which scorned authority and tradition and believed in materialism and radical change in government through terrorism and assassination.

Romanticism

Formalized by Jean Jacques Rousseau and derived from pantheism, this doctrine holds that God is immanent in nature and ourselves.  Therefore, self-fulfillment is the basis for morality, and whatever enriches self must be good, while whatever diminishes self must be bad. 

Romanticism exalts the senses and emotions over reason and intellect, admires the heroic and the individuality and imagination of the artist and is interested in the medieval, exotic, primitive, and nationalistic. 

This worldview is defined by a heightened interest in nature, an emphasis on emotion and imagination and rebellion against established social rules and conventions.  Today, romantic is often used in a derogatory sense and implies unrestrained sensuousness, vague imagery, lack of logical precision and escape from reality.

Romanticism inspired several streams in philosophy such as a return to occultism and the present New Age movement, National Socialism (Nazi), Fascism, and Communism. 

English literary Romantics like Lord Byron, John Keats and P.B. Shelley focused on the individual's highly personal response to life.  The Gothic Romantics like Sir Walter Scott became enamored of the cult of medievalism.  The German Romantics like Goethe, Schiller, the brothers Grimm, and Wagner eventually inspired Nietzsche and then Adolf Hitler.  In America Romanticism birthed Transcendentalism.

Existentialism

This doctrine is that there is no inherent meaning in life and that natural laws are meaningless.  Since meaning for an existentialist is a purely human phenomenon, humans can create meaning for themselves, but no one can provide meaning for someone else.

A 20th century philosophy, Existentialism centers on the individual and the individual's relationship to the universe or to God. 

Sòren Kierkegaard developed a Christian existentialism wherein concrete ethical and religious demands confront the individual, who is forced each time to make a commitment.  The necessity and seriousness of these decisions cause him dread and despair.

Jean Paul Sartre held that existence precedes essence, and that there is no God and no fixed human nature, so each person is totally free and entirely responsible for what he or she becomes and does. It is said that Sartre cried out to God on his deathbed. 

Camus, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Buber and Karl Jaspers are often treated as existentialists.

An offshoot of Existentialism is contemporary Relativism, which holds that every meaning one chooses whether religion or worldview is equally valid.

Nominalism

This doctrine is that reality and god are concepts in name only, convenience of language and thought.  Everything is imaginary, which the Hindus call Maya (illusion).  Therefore, magical thinking can change this ephemeral reality.

Originally, Nominalism was a doctrine of the late Middle Ages that all universal or abstract terms are mere necessities of thought or conveniences of language and therefore exist as names only and have no realities corresponding to them. 

Realism

This doctrine is that universals have objective reality (ontology), as opposed to Nominalismand that material objects exist in themselves, apart from the mind's perception or consciousness of them (epistemology), as opposed to Idealism, which holds that reality exists only in the mind.

Orthodox Christians and Jews have a real ontology and epistemology.

Idealism

This doctrine is that the objects of perception are actually ideas of the perceiving mind and that it is impossible to know whether reality exists apart from the mind as opposed to Realism and Materialism.  Idealism attempts to account for all objects in nature and experience as representations of the mind and sometimes assigns to such representations a higher order of existence. 

Plato conceived a world in which eternal ideas constituted reality.  Modern Idealism refers the source of ideas to the individual's consciousness.  In Kant's Transcendental Idealism the world of human understanding opposed the world of things-in-themselves.  Later German Idealists like Hegel treated all reality as the creation of mind.

New age

New Age is a complex of recent spiritual and consciousness-raising beliefs and doctrines that cover a range of themes from a belief in Spiritualism and reincarnation to advocacy of holistic approaches to health and ecology.

Much of the New Age worldview is Neo-platonist,  which was a mystical philosophy based on the later doctrines of  Plato.  It was developed in the third century A.D. by Plotinus, who saw reality as one vast hierarchical order containing all the various levels and kinds of existence.  At the center is the god, an incomprehensible, all-sufficient unity that flows out in a radiating process called emanation, giving rise to the Divine Mind, or Logos. The Logos contains all intelligent forms of all individuals.

Later Neo-platonists incorporated such disparate elements as Eastern mysticism, divination, demonology and astrology.

Occultism

Occultism is a belief in occult powers and the possibility of bringing them under human control.  It includes spiritualism, sorcery, divination, astral body, spirit body, ethereal body, spirit manifestation, ectoplasm, telekinesis, poltergeists, spirit-rapping, automatic writing, spiritualistic apparatus, Ouija board, psychical research, Transcendentalism, esoteric, Cabbalism, reincarnation, theosophy, Rosicrucianism, alchemy, astrologer, fortune-teller and palmistry.  It implies having a secret or hidden meaning.

God’s word is clear about Occultism:

“Let no one be found among you who sacrifices his son or daughter in the fire, who practices divination or  sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead. Anyone who does these things is detestable to the LORD, and because of these detestable practices the LORD your God will drive out those nations before you.” Deuteronomy 18:10-12 (NIV).

 

Biblical Theism

Theism is the realization that the Creator God created the universe. Therefore, we can explore and study (science) because we know that the universe was made according to a plan and is not haphazard.  Unlike the pagan belief in many gods that causes fear and uncertainty about the nature of the world, biblical theists understand that the world has order.  So they can develop science and technology.  Furthermore, biblical theism realizes that God reveals himself and His order in the universe (Romans 1) so the universe is knowable.  The biblical theist also understands that God is good and that man has been given stewardship over the earth. Finally, the theist knows that he has fallen short of God’s glory, but that God has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ to reconcile man to God and bring us into the fullness of His Kingdom.

Biblical theism gives man the liberty to pursue knowledge and understanding, the assurance that good will triumph, and the opportunity to enter into the Grace of a relationship with our Creator and be delivered from the alienation, confusion and demons of our fallen condition.

Christian worldview

The Bible provides the definitive answer to the meaning of the Christian worldview, which is biblical theism.  God has revealed Himself in creation so that no person can say, “I didn’t know there was a God” because:

• “...that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them.  For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.”  Romans 1:19, 20.

• He chose to reveal Himself most completely in written word.  For this reason, ultimately, the Christian worldview and the biblical worldview are synonymous.

• Other Scriptures that provide the basis of a Christian worldview (viewing all things in life through the lens of Scripture) include:

• “‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the LORD.  ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.’” (Isaiah 55:8,9);

• “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is  his good, pleasing and perfect will.” (Romans 12:2); and,

• “We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.” (II Corinthians 10:5)

These Scriptures help us see how critically important it is that we think as God thinks to the degree granted by Him.  This is a fundamental meaning of the Christian worldview.

Other questions that must be answered to more fully understand every worldview:

• What is the origin of man?

• How was man created?

• Is there purpose in life?

• Why do I exist?

• Why is there evil in the world?

• Does God care about my suffering?

• Is there an after-life?

• Are all religions that believe in God valid?

• Will there be an end to life on earth as we know it?

Most people ask themselves these or similar questions while thinking about God.

How your theology shapes your worldview[34]

Here are some key doctrinal questions for you to use to evaluate different worldviews. These doctrinal questions are adapted from those asked by Michael S. Horton in an article in MOVIEGUIDE ®.

1. The doctrine of God

Does God have all power and authority over the universe, or is history a battle between good and evil forces (dualism)? 

Is this world rational and ordered?  What is justice, goodness, truth, beauty?  How are these reflections of God's character? 

What is the significance of the affirmation that "the Word became flesh" for our view of our humanness and the importance of this world? 

Is God the separate, sovereign, creator of the universe as in theism?  Or is God part of the universe as in pantheism, polytheism and monism?

2. The doctrine of man

Is man a product of chance?  Are we part of God or distinct creations of God? What distinguishes humans from the rest of creation? 

What is the “image of God”?  Do people still possess that image even if they aren't Christians?  What does this mean for the arena of life we share in common with non-Christians (work and play, etc.)? 

Are humans basically good or evil?  How are we dead in our sins?  How are we cut off from God?  What does original sin mean? 

What does this mean for government and law?  How do we balance liberty and justice?  Can we expect to build an ideal society?

3. The doctrine of salvation

Is salvation eternal or temporal? 

Do people really need saving?  From what? 

Of what does the Christian doctrine of salvation consist?  Is salvation the work of God entirely?

How can man save himself?  If man can save himself, why did Jesus Christ need to die on the cross and be resurrected?

4. The doctrine of the Church

Are we saved from the world, or saved in the world?  Is the church a community that is separated from the world or to God in the world? 

Is the church a community of only those who are truly saved, or is it a mixed body of Christians and hypocrites who will only be sorted out on the last day? 

How important are the earthly sacraments of bread, wine and water in our Christian experience? 

What are my responsibilities to the church as well as to my calling?

5. The doctrine of history and the future

Is God's history of salvation, from Genesis to Revelation, a story of escape from this world and normal human history, or a story of providence and redemption in real time and space history? 

Are we wasting our time getting involved in this world when it is going to pass away at our Lord's return?

6. The doctrine of the nature of reality  ontology

Do we live in a real world – ontological realism?

Or, do we live in a great thought or imaginary world that can be shaped by magical thinking – ontological nominalism?

7. The doctrine of knowledge – epistemology

Can we know that something exists such as a tree falling in the forest – epistemological realism?

Or, can we never know with certainty anything and so must make believe that reality exists – epistemological nominalism?

 

MEDIA WISDOM

“They shall teach my people the difference between the holy and the unholy and cause them to discern between the unclean and the clean.”  - Ezekiel 44:23.

Describing the elephant

To teach discernment, you must understand that many parents primarily look at the entertainment media semantically in terms of the amount of sex, violence, nudity, and profanity, while many children just look at the entertainment media syntactically in terms of the rhythm, action, adventure and special effects.  So parents and children talk at each other about the entertainment media, not to each other.

Children are not immune to the messages of the mass media, but it is the syntactical elements of those messages influence them.  Try asking a younger child what he or she is watching on television.  Quite often he or she will say, “I don’t know.”  Ask the child what the program is about and often he or she will repeat, “I don’t know.”

However, pay attention to the child’s actions, and you will often see him or her mimicking the behavior he or she is watching.   Or, later he or she will mimic the behavior or ask for a product that was advertised with the program.

Thumbs up

One set of keys to media literacy is to teach your children to analyze the mass media product by deciphering, decoding and detecting meaning in the mass media communication and then to compare and evaluate that meaning with a biblical worldview so as to understand and discern.  Once they learn the right questions to ask, you can help your children broaden their perspective and develop discernment by having them review, critique and report on the mass media they see and hear.

One of the most important keys to developing the biblical discernment needed to choose the right entertainment is asking the right questions.  The entertainment media are loaded with messages.  Learning how to discover these messages helps you appreciate the movies and television programs you watch, the games you play, the music you listen to and the mass media information sources upon which you rely.

Asking the right questions about the entertainment media requires media literacy and a working knowledge of how the medium in question communicates and entertains.  Developing discernment requires comparing the messages you discover from the questions you ask with the standards and principles presented by a Christian worldview.

There are two types of questions presented:

• Ascertainment questions  which help us isolate elements, evidence, meaning, point-of-view, and worldview in a particular mass media product.

• Discernment questions – which help us to compare the answers to our ascertainment questions with the biblical standard.

We will look briefly at those elements that make up powerful, dramatic entertainment.  This analysis will be framed as a series of questions to guide you to ask the right questions about the entertainment product you, your children and friends view.  These questions will help you look beneath the surface of an entertainment product to determine whether you and God’s Word written[35] agree with the messages the media product communicates.

This is a call to action, including active viewing and listening.  It is beneficial to discern the subtle ways in which seemingly innocuous material molds our thinking through explaining its elements to others.  This is especially important for Christian parents to consider. 

For the reasons stated in the introduction, I will focus on movies and videos, but the principles apply and are easily adapted to other media. Stimulating children to interact with their entertainment media experience rather than simply absorbing it is crucial.

But, first

On the way to the THEATRE and before the video brainstorm with your child for prior knowledge about the story or content matter.  This gives you an opportunity to share a short description of the movie’s plot and characters.  Before the film begins you can encourage children to imagine the characters and what could happen.  If the child’s thinking is activated prior to the passive activity of watching, they can engage in the story and learn from the plot on the screen.

Prior to viewing, to facilitate active viewing:

• Talk about the title, images and ideas about the plot.

• Predict the character types and action in the film.

• Ask what your children know that they can bring  to the film.

• Use MOVIEGUIDE’s “In Brief” as an introduction to the film.

• If viewing a video, plan to stop the video for predictions of a character’s actions or plot twists,  but too much stopping is not recommended as it may disrupt the rhythm of the film.

HINT: Set the timer so that if you or older children see something worth discussing in the video, you can easily return to that section after the movie.

Elemental And Evidentiary Questions

The first set of questions we will ask are known as elemental and evidentiary questions because they deal with elements of the mass media product that are easily ascertained.  Most of these questions help us to find out the facts of the mass media product about which most thinking people will agree.  It should be clear after reviewing these questions that there are many other questions that we can and should ask in order to be media literate and discerning to choose the good and reject the bad.

These are key questions to ask your child after watching a movie.  They’re sure to help launch an animated discussion.  It is important to set a tone that supports the child’s responses and creative impressions of the story.

Ascertainment question: Who is the hero?

Usually the easiest question for anyone, including children, to answer about a movie, television program, computer game, stage play, book or story is: Who is the hero or heroine?  Of course, when we are confronted by some modern literature wherein the reader has to realize that he is the hero (or the hero doesn’t exist), or if we probe beyond the character’s name to find out his characteristics, then this question becomes much more complex.

Many dramatists[36] talk not about the main character in the story whom most people would consider the hero, but rather about the character who forces the action, whom the dramatists call the protagonist. From a dramatist’s point-of-view the villain, such as Judas in the Passion story, can be the protagonist if he forces the action, whereas the hero, Jesus, may be the antagonist because he opposes the protagonist.  Even so our main character, in this case Jesus, remains the hero because he triumphs over his opponent(s).

For our purposes, we can conclude that in most cases, especially as far as popular entertainment is concerned, the hero is the main character who is the focus of the story.  Using this insight, most children can find the hero in most entertainment media product.

However, knowing the name of the hero is not enough to be discerning.  To understand who the hero is we must analyze the hero's bone structure. The bone structure of any character is the combination of all the characteristics that make up the character.  In analyzing a character's bone structure we need to look at the following: his physical characteristics; his background; his psychological characteristics; and his religious characteristics.

As a guide to the impact a hero has on a story, the following reminder of the archetypal story genre are helpful:

• In the mythic story, such as THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, God triumphs, or the hero triumphs because of an act of God.

• In the heroic story, such as HIGH NOON, the hero triumphs because he or she is superior.

• In the high ironic story, such as FORREST GUMP, the hero triumphs because of an quirk of fate or circumstances.

• In the low ironic story, such as DEATH OF A SALESMAN, the hero fails because of a quirk of fate or circumstances.

• In the demonic story, which includes not only many horror films but also psychological movies and political films such as THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK, the hero is hopelessly overwhelmed by evil.

The next movie, television program, story, or game with which you interact, locate the hero or heroine and describe his or her character traits.

Discernment question: What kind of a role model is the hero?

After locating the hero or heroine in the entertainment product and identifying his or her character traits, you need to discern whether or not he or she is a worthy role model. It is not safe to assume that the heroes of today's movies are the positive role models we want for our impressionable children.  Even where the premise is positive and the morals in the entertainment product reflect a Christian worldview, we must ask the question: Is the hero compatible with the biblical role model?

Comparing three of action star Sylvester Stallone's characters  ROCKY, RAMBO and COBRA (one of his lesser known, later characters)  illustrates the different messages that a hero can communicate through his or her character traits in movies with basically the same premise:

• ROCKY is an ironic hero who loves his family, prays and tries to do the right thing, although he is reduced to using brute force to prove his worth and win in our complex modern society.  Rocky's use of force in the boxing ring is mitigated by the fact that he prays before each fight, demonstrating his reliance on God and not on his own prowess. (Note that in ROCKY IV, Rocky steps out of character and pursues vengeance for its own sake.)

• RAMBO is a haunted man who strikes out at the country (USA) that abandoned him to die in Vietnam and tries to rescue his buddies who have suffered a similar fate.  Rambo has lost faith in everyone and ends up by asking why the rug of faith was pulled out from under him by the country he loved.  He uses brute force to triumph out of anger and frustration.

• COBRA is a killing machine who sets himself up as judge and jury.  He is the ultimate humanist, a product of  Ayn Rand, Nietzsche and Hobbes, who exhibits the solipsistic heresy of titanism.

THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST pushed the desecration of the hero one step further.  Never before in history had moviemakers declared war on Jesus.  Here are excerpts from notes taken by Evelyn Dokovic of Morality in Media at a screening of THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST:[37]

• “Judas berates Jesus for making crosses that are used by the Romans to kill Jews.  As they talk, Jesus indicates that he is struggling.  (Viewer observation:  Jesus is weak, confused, fearful, doesn't know who he is, from time to time falls on the ground in a faint after hearing voices.  He doesn't know if the voices come from God or the devil.)

• “Jesus seems to be helping them crucify the man.  He revives and says he wants God to hate him. He makes crosses because he wants God to hate him.

• “The viewer sees a bare-breasted woman sitting at a well.  Jesus proceeds on his way to Mary Magdalene's house.  He has to wait in line to get in.  When he does the room is filled with men sitting down, watching Mary have sex with a customer.  Jesus sits down and watches, too.

• “Jesus says: 'I'm a liar, a hypocrite, I'm afraid of everything.  Do you want to know who my God is?  They're fear.  Lucifer is inside me.  He tells me I am not a man, but the Son of Man, more the Son of God, more than that, God.'

• “Jesus is walking with his wives (bigamy) and children, and stops to listen to a preacher  St. Paul.  He is telling the people that Jesus of Nazareth  was the Son of God, that he was tortured and crucified for our sins, and that three days later He rose from the dead.

• “Jesus screams: 'Liar.'  Jesus tells Paul that he is Jesus, asks why he is telling these lies.  Jesus says: 'I was saved.  I have children.'  Paul tells him to look around him and see how unhappy the people are.  Their only hope is the resurrected Jesus.  Paul says: 'They need God.  If I have to crucify you, I'll crucify you.  If I have to resurrect you, I'll resurrect you.  My Jesus is more important than you are.  I'm glad I met you.  Now I can forget about you.’"

This hero is evil and this movie is blasphemy.  To think that Jesus, the Word, who was in the beginning, through Whom all things were made, who is God, was lusting in His holy heart for one of His creations is grotesque and horrifying (see John 1).  This film desecrates the sinless Lamb of God who cleansed us through His death and resurrection.  THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST is the ultimate desecration of the hero, even though the premise says that good triumphs over evil.

 Subsidiary discernment questions:

• If the hero is not a moral character, how would the story change if the hero was a moral character?

• How would you tell the story from another character’s viewpoint?

• Do you know anyone like the hero?

• Is there a character in the Bible who is like the hero?  Who is it?  What is their story?

Ascertainment question: Who is the villain?

As in the case of the hero, you need to identify the villain and his character traits.  In most entertainment product the villain is easy to identify, but there are exceptions.

To identify the villain, it is helpful to recall the four basic plots:

• Man against man.

• Man against nature.

• Man against himself.

• Man against the supernatural or the sub-natural.

In the remake of CAPE FEAR, the villain does not say he is a Christian, but does have Bible verses tattooed on his body and spouts contemporary Christian code words in a malevolent manner. Therefore, you need to look at all the attributes of character to see if he is supposed to be a Christian.

Once you have identified the villain, you should list his character traits in the same manner that you did with the hero.  You will want to list physical characteristics, background, psychological characteristics, and religious characteristics.

Since the demise of the motion picture and television codes, there have been many media products portraying those who are moral as prudes, nerds, kooks, and psychopaths.  One of the first was MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969), which portrayed a street preacher as a sleazy homosexual who leads the hero into homosexual prostitution.  The movie CRIMINAL LAW (1989) went further by portraying pro-lifers, who do not think that babies should be murdered in their mothers' wombs, as psychopathic killers.

In